


Fall Chicken

by tokyoblackbird



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: M/M, dubcon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-08 02:50:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5480501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tokyoblackbird/pseuds/tokyoblackbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Am I just a chicken leg to him? wondered Kise.</p><p>AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Ryouta was five years old. He was at a picnic with Daiki in Clark Park. Maybe it was summertime, although his childhood memories all had a summertime air (a tendency that had since faded, post-adolescence, to an icy wet Fall). His mother packed them both brown bags with soft white PB & J sandwiches cut into dinosaurs, and apple slices marinated in lemon juice and cinnamon, and juice boxes, both cherry flavor so they would have nothing to fight about (even then, they were always fighting).

Those brown bags, labeled “Ryouta” and “Daiki” were pushed to the side, crumpled in the grass off the edge of the picnic blanket. Instead, greedily, Aomine and Kise dug into the bucket of fried chicken Mrs. Aomine had handed them.

Mrs. Kise and Mrs. Aomine were gossiping with Mrs. Midorima on the sole picnic table, under a leaning oak. There was a small community of Japanese in West Philadelphia, centered around a Japanese school that met in the basement of Christ Church. The mothers had originally met at the annual Obon festival, and their sons studied Japanese in the basement every Saturday morning, but it had been difficult for them to meet up and chat. Mrs. Aomine worked late at the supermarket and Mrs. Midorima was prone to anxiety attacks; the frequency with which Mrs. Kise, extremely wealthy and extremely bored, called them bordered on neurotic, but these irritants and cares were all forgotten. It was a rare Sunday for the women, a happy Sunday. Rumor had it Shintarou had inherited his mother’s anxiety; he certainly was high-strung. Daiki and Ryouta rarely talked to him. But even Shintarou seemed content, in his sandbox, seated in the center of a growing fortress of sand, reinforced with wood chips and stones.

In Ryouta’s memory these details were a hazy golden violin and birdsong backdrop to Daiki eating chicken.

Ryouta could never forget, it was one of his earliest memories, Daiki crunching through a chicken leg bigger than his mouth. His greasy face, rivulets of oil sliding down his forearms, the dark red of the meat near the bone, the resulting spray of crumbs. He was a serious eater, he didn’t talk, so each ragged white mouthful grew steadily into a clean absence.

(The best thing, Ryouta thought, was knowing exactly how the chicken tasted in Daiki’s mouth. Over the years, he often tried to replicate that certainty by forcing food on Daiki, and it never failed to please him, to share.)

At the close, wings were treated to delicate kisses to extract meat caught between radius and ulna. Cartilage was gnawed. In the end, Daiki would give the bone a disappointed glare before throwing it as hard as he could into the hedge that fenced the park.

The entire act was very like Daiki. And so, so delicious. But if Ryouta could pare that memory down to just one exquisite second, it would be the first bite, the monstrous sinking of Daiki’s teeth into meat. That wet, tearing sound.

Ryouta thought they might have been having an eating contest that day, though they hadn’t formally declared one. It was likely, though, because they were always fighting. It got to the point that their arguments lingered without words. But in his memory it seemed like such a peaceful Sunday.

 

* * *

 

Ryouta was reminded of that Sunday, thirteen years later, on the first of October, as Daiki sunk his teeth into the tense muscle between neck and shoulder. “Aominecchi, no!” He tried to push him away, and instead was rewarded with Daiki’s full crushing weight pinning him to the carpet. It was the coarse wool kind that had grown hard and matted under Aomine’s sneakers, bristling with detritus, crumbs, sand, splinters. (Ryouta felt also, under his ankle, the glossy page of an open magazine.)

“Can’t breathe--” They had just gotten off the court. Daiki had won, had scored and blocked successfully for an hour straight until Ryouta was out of breath and staggering and exhilarated and furious. Daiki wore a white t-shirt that was growing ragged with washes. He had slung an arm around Ryouta’s shoulder and they had walked that way to Daiki’s house. Mrs. Aomine was at work. Upon closing the front door, upon locking it with a hard click, Daiki pressed his mouth into the sweat-soaked nape of Kise’s neck and walked him upstairs to his room.

Daiki’s t-shirt was so familiar and soft. The bedroom carpet was rough.

Daiki was a man of singular focus, and his focus was pleasure. He did not speak unless it pleased him. He scraped a red line down Ryouta’s chest with teeth and stubble, teeth knocking against collarbone and rib; he paused only to suck indulgently on a nipple, prodding it with his tongue, rolling it across his teeth. His calloused hand scratched circles on Ryouta’s stomach, between the wings of his hips, just under his belly button. “Tell me what you want.”

Ryouta shook his head even as he shuddered. He could not breathe under Daiki’s weight.

Daiki locked both of Ryouta’s hands in his own and pressed their tangle of fingers hard down into Ryouta’s chest. He bit into Ryouta’s side, in the soft, pale indentation between ribcage and hipbone, and Ryouta cried, struggling to free himself. But Daiki had always been stronger. “What do you want?”

Am I just a chicken leg to him, Ryouta wondered, as Daiki bit him again. The pain sparked tears. And so the the chicken leg fell in love with the man, he thought. What a stupid chicken leg. What an awful man. (Surely there were better love stories.)

Ryouta had been in love with Daiki for as long as he could remember. He could even remember just a month ago when all he wanted was this kind of torture. (He had a realistic imagination. He had known with Daiki it would certainly be torture.) But now...

“Let go--” From neck to hip, a stinging trail. The pressure of their fists pressing into the center of his chest. And the growing numbness from being so contorted by force.

Ryouta’s back and shoulders were bent back and screaming with pain and his legs had been pried open and held in position with Daiki’s hips and he was sweating and shivering and naked under the harsh fluorescent light and there would be marks and bruises and his manager would be pissed and the gossip machine would turn and everyone would ask, “Who are you dating?” and he would not know what to say.

 

* * *

 

(Suddenly, a Buzzfeed Video scenario:

Young journalist, tragically ironic in many ways, including but not limited to: hipster attire, complete lack of grammar and fact-checking ability, and massive, undue influence over every woman under the age of thirty (aka Ryouta’s demographic and all his classmates): “So, Ryouta, are you dating anyone?”

Now Ryouta is wearing a long-sleeved blue sweater and a gray scarf and a beanie (to cover his nibbled earlobes) and a watch (Swiss) and a bracelet (organic and sustainable soy leather) and sure there was a red mark on his cheekbone but it could be just a mosquito bite and the interview is going really well, the journalist is leaning forward in her seat and can’t stop smiling and Ryouta lifts his arm to the back of his head to strike that charming “haha, well you see” pose and as he drops his arm, his scarf catches on the watch and slides away to reveal a chain of hickeys all down his neck.

The Buzzfeed journalist stares at the hickeys. Of course he is dating someone, she thinks.

The entire set stares at the hickeys. He is absolutely dating someone.

An assistant runs off set immediately to publish headline, “Bad Boy Ryouta Kise Shows Signs of SEX. KINKY SEXY SEX, a BUZZFEED EXCLUSIVE. Also SEX.” (Also a companion quiz: “Which of Ryouta’s Hickeys are You?”)

“If you don’t mind me asking, who are you dating?” asks the hipster journalist.

From that point, there are two viable options:

Ryouta blushes. “Um, Daiki Aomine. He’s my teammate on the basketball team and we’ve been together for three years. Honestly, I think he’s the one I will marry. I love him very much and only ask that you respect his privacy.”

Buzzfeed immediately dispatches helicopters to the Aomine residence. Reporters rappel from ladders onto Daiki’s roof, double-wielding megaphones and microphones. “ARE YOU DATING RYOUTA KISE? DID YOU GUYS FUCK LAST NIGHT? DOES HE CRY WHEN HE COMES? HOW MANY CHILDREN?” (They probe like psycho grandmothers, with a million twitter subscribers hanging on to their every word.)

And Daiki opens up the window. He calmly seizes a microphone. He says--

Ryouta is afraid of what he’d say. Because he knows Daiki is so casually cruel. Without malice the way Atsushi could be cruel, and without forethought like Sei. It was the cruelty of a king born certain of his place in the world.

“Nah, we’re not dating. Ryouta’s stupid and also dumb. Now get off my fucking lawn.”

The second option:

Ryouta blushes. “This was just promotional makeup for an upcoming photoshoot [which I will create right away the instant I get out of here]. I’m still looking for that special someone hahahahahahaha.”

Daiki, that evening, at the front door of Ryouta’s house: “Satsuki said you were on Buzzfeed. You forgot about last night, huh.” His gaze is all smoldery. “Guess it didn’t leave a mark.” He starts to kiss him.

“Ah, no, Aominecchi, please, my sisters are in the living room; they’ll see...” (Ah, but it feels so good.)

And then Daiki seizes him and they start KINKY SEXY SEX against the doorframe.

“Oh no, oh no.” (At that point he is not certain if it feels good, only that it was what he had always dreamed of, so shouldn’t he be happy?)

 

* * *

 

“Let me go...” Ryouta felt Daiki’s cock hard against his leg. He could hear Daiki’s breath quicken as he looked at Ryouta laid out, disheveled and tearful underneath him.

Daiki rolled Ryouta onto his stomach, pressed his face into the coarse, gray carpet.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Ryouta had been in love with Daiki for as long as he could remember. At least that’s what he seemed to remember. He recalled when he was six years old in the back of the carpool from swimming lessons.

Daiki had been wearing a white t-shirt. They had spent the entire summer running around the neighborhood, learning basketball from the nice middle school kids in their school court, chasing pigeons around the abandoned lot by Daiki’s house, picking mulberries from the trees alongside the road (swallowing bugs), and occasionally fighting to the death in the hay around the private stables of the Akashi manse while Ryouta’s grandmother trailed slowly behind, pausing occasionally to paint, in a little notebook, translucent watercolors of sunlight through leaves. (Ryouta wanted to wait for her, but Daiki always ran ahead, and Ryouta followed.)

Ryouta got sunburnt and became an itchy, peeling strawberry red, but Daiki browned deliciously, like a meat bun. Even in the air-conditioned blast of Mrs. Kise’s minivan, the summer warmth of Daiki’s skin contrasted against cool white cotton.

“Aominecchi? Look, look.”

“What.” His dark hair was plastered to his head with pool chlorine and sweat, his cheeks flushed under his tan. Even at six, he looked so at ease inside his body, so confident and so comfortable. He cast Ryouta a sideways glance.

Ryouta blew him a kiss.

He was at least half-joking. He giggled. He expected the usual outrage, the “Ew cooties, I got Ryouta’s cooties,” but Daiki remained silent. Just looked at him until he felt himself blush redder than his sunburn.

Ryouta had loved Daiki for as long as he could remember.

 

* * *

 

Tetsuya found it unexpected because it was such a mild Thursday morning. Unseasonably warm for November, and damp. In the humidity hung the remnants of a sweaty summer smell, mixed with food truck bacon and wet earth. He set a brisk pace; Ryouta trotted after. The red leaves underfoot were slippery, but only Ryouta, in his pressed suit and shiny black shoes, seemed concerned about falling, and even then, he was faster than Daiki. Daiki slouched behind in yesterday’s sweatpants and a wrinkled white t-shirt, disgruntled and half-asleep. (There was a yellowish food stain near his stomach and he smelled both peppery and sour. He was absolutely not in uniform.) Ryouta kept anxiously glancing over his shoulder, and each time he checked, Daiki seemed further and further behind.

The whole thing was irritating particularly because Daiki was lightning on the court.

“Aominecchi! _Hurry_!”

Akashi High was at the end of Maple, a tree-lined residential street. At three blocks away, the sounds of morning rituals emerging from the open windows around them--the hiss of running water and the clink of cutlery--gave way to bright, vapid schoolyard chatter. Every so often, a door would slam and lock, and a middle-aged marketing associate or senior secretary would pull out of a driveway and vanish along a crossroad to a faster avenue, Pine or Chestnut.

Tetsuya’s parents had both gone to Akashi High, and then Penn State, and now they were one of those commuting professionals, a doctor and a nurse. One day, Tetsuya knew, he would join them. This understanding was uncoupled to any strong emotion. The path was laid out for him and he followed it, content with making observations as he was pulled along by mundane destiny. As the white heads of the flagpoles and the mirrored windows of the third floor science wing windows rose up from the trees, Tetsuya heard the tolling of the first bell.

Outwardly unperturbed, he shoved his hands deeper into his blazer pockets and walked faster. Ryouta gave a little yelp and jump.

“Oh my god, we’re so fucked. Did you hear that, Aominecchi? Hurry!”

"Don’t fucking care,” Daiki muttered.

“What if they lock us out? We’re going to miss the PATs. My parents will kill me. It’ll be all over the tabloids, how embarrassing. My parents will kill me. Why are you _so fucking slow_?”

Louder, Daiki. “Do not fucking care.”

Ryouta stopped.

“You don’t care?” he said. “You don’t care that you won’t get into college and will end up a deadbeat flipping burgers in McDonalds? Is that all you want for your life? Are you serious, Aominecchi?”

(“Argue later, run now,” Tetsuya said, but of course neither heard him.)

“Shut up,” said Daiki. “Don't care about dumb shit.”

“Well this dumb shit matters to _me_.”

Now they had both stopped walking. Now they were toe to toe. (Tetsuya, out of loyalty, stopped too, a little ways ahead. “Really? _Really?_ ”)

“When did you become my mom?” Daiki said. "Fucking pathetic."

“I am _not_ going to spend the rest of my life with a fucking deadbeat meathead,” Kise hissed. “I can’t do that. I won’t.”

Somewhere in Tetsuya’ head, a little Tetsuya pulled out a pen and notebook and made a mildly interesting note. Then the second bell rang and he decided to “ahem,” an expert noise he used to remind people that he was in fact, still there. Trusted and time-tested.

It did not work.

Whispered Kise: “I’m embarrassed to call you my boyfriend.”

Daiki seized Ryouta by his shirt collar so that Ryouta’s head snapped back. His fist hovered in the air. Kise flinched, startled to tears. Tetsuya sighed and readied his bodyguard swan dive.

And then Daiki simply let go. He let Kise collapse on the wet sidewalk. 

He stalked off, back towards his house on 49th.

Probably he'd be in the playground around the back. Probably in half an hour he'd be asleep sprawled out on the slide, careless as always, frightening the neighborhood children.

Tetsuya crouched and offered a hand. "Kise? Kise, come on. Let's go."

But it was as if he had finally truly became just air. Kise ignored his hand. He got up. Dusted himself off (though the slush of soggy leaves left hideous brown stains across the backside of his pristine gray khakis). And began to fiddle with his cell phone. He turned a slow circle and also began to wander away from school. 

"Kise? Kise?"

Kise was utterly engrossed in scrolling through his text messages. Tetsuya peered at the screen as Kise's thumb kept scrolling down and down and down. He really had a lot of text messages. Most from nameless numbers. "Kise, it's not worth it." He tried to grab his hand. Kise shook him off with a sharp jerk and resumed.

Tetsuya had not expected to be caught in a difficult situation on a mild Thursday morning, but he knew at least one thing could be saved: his PAT score.

He heaved a sigh, touched Kise lightly on the shoulder, and continued to class.

But the PATs were made more difficult by the memory of Kise's blank expression, bent over his phone, gently shivering. All throughout the critical reading section, the memory of Kise’s carefully measured breathing made concentrating difficult. By the math section, Kuroko had resigned to selecting more “E. None of the Above”s than was probably good for him.

It was much like getting a song stuck in your head, Tetsuya thought, except the song made him increasingly depressed. And the fact that he was depressed made him more depressed. He had never intended to care about the weird jocks in the Akashi High basketball team, but it seemed to have happened anyway. It seemed he was lonelier than he had thought.


	3. Chapter 3

Daiki lay sprawled in bed wearing expired sweatpants and a collection of new stains. He no longer smelled peppery and sour; he smelled complicated. Shintarou had finished his homework early and was working on an extra credit science project which required use of Daiki’s twelve pet crawfish. The effect of light stressors on magnetoreception. Something like that. That was what he said he was visiting for, anyway. He had set up a labeled grid under the tank and waved, in gentle circles, a fat magnet in his right hand (also, conveniently, his lucky item), his cell phone flashlight in his left. Occasionally he jotted coordinates on his laptop or pecked rapidly at a calculator with a proffered pinky finger. Never once did he look up.

Still, he listened patiently to Daiki and only rolled his eyes occasionally.

“I can’t believe he won’t talk to me. We’ve been together since we were three.”

“Personalities change rapidly during puberty.” He pressed the magnet directly against the glass near a particularly apathetic crayfish.

“That’s not it. You’re still a nerd. Akashi’s still insane. Kise’s still goddamn annoying.”

“Change blindness. Frog in a kettle. Also, I am _intelligent_.” The crayfish refused to budge. He gave the glass a tap. “But I understand that is a foreign concept to you.”

“No, that’s not it,” Daiki insisted. He couldn’t understand it. They had always fought and it had never come to anything. Within days, hours, Ryouta would be at his front door, yapping away as always, with his, “I’m so sorry, please don’t be mad, come on, Aominecchi, let’s not fight, let’s go.” See a movie. Grab a burger. Make out. Play ball.

“You will find, as you grow apart, that the past becomes irrelevant. People change and you need to shower. You stink.” The crayfish seemed to have gone to sleep. “Maybe this magnet isn’t strong enough. I will build an electromagnet.”

“No, you don’t understand. You weren’t there. We’re blood brothers.”

Shintarou nudged up his glasses and waited for this stupid development.

“When we were twelve, me and Ryouta cut up our hands and pressed them together. Look.” He turned and found Daiki’s palm inches from his face. There was indeed a long scar, running from the base of the index finger diagonally to the wrist. By its crookedness, it seemed its creation had been incredibly painful.

“So that’s where that was from? I can’t believe someone could be so stupid, but for you and Kise, I’ll make an exception.”

“What would a lonely nerd like you know? It’s so we have the same blood, dumbass.”

Shintarou snorted. “That’s highly unlikely. Unless you have compatible blood types, any of Kise’s blood within you have been consumed by macrophages. Either way, the RBCs would have died after 120 days maximum, with the same end result: egestion.” Completely abandoning the experimental process, he treated the crayfish to the double magnet and flashlight assault.

“Eh? Egestion?”

“Shit.” This wasn’t entirely true, but Daiki was irritating.

“You’re saying I don’t have Ryouta’s blood in me?”

“Yes, that is what I said. Also that you put yourselves at risk for infection and nerve damage.”

“No way.” Aomine yawned and stretched, dislodging a pile of Playboys from his bed with his foot. “We’re blood brothers.”

A vein throbbed in Shintarou’s forehead. Stupid crayfish.

“I strongly recommend you bathe, get out of bed, and start studying for the PATs. It’s still possible to take a makeup exam. Granted, you did miss a week of school, but Akashi said he would talk to his father. So long as we win the Winter Cup, he said.”

“He’ll come _crying_ back.” At this point, it seemed Daiki was talking to the universe; it was not hard to believe he had gone fully insane from a week of falling in and out of oversleep. “I am his god. Ever since we were three.”

“Daiki, you’re an imbecile, emotionally stunted, and you stink. Are you stupid?”

But Daiki knew that wasn’t true. Shintarou hadn’t really been there. He hadn’t known what it was like, to be the god of someone’s universe. “They said absolute power is a dangerous thing.”

“Aomine, I believe you have a dead crayfish.”


	4. Chapter 4

  **DAY 10**

“Look at me.”

Ryouta turned his head and smiled. A flash of light.

He was reclined on a creamy leather couch, his arm pillowed under his head, his hair damp with gel and tousled.

Seraph Studios ran out of a loft on the fourth floor of a converted fabric mill in Callowhill. Heavy black drapery hung from ceiling to floor on three out of the four walls (the yellow afternoon sun slipped through the scalloped gaps right under the curtain rod). Four stages had been set up around the room, three slotted perpendicular to each other on one side of the room, the fourth dominating the far wall. The three smaller one were dark and unattended. Ryouta was inset in the fourth.

He wore a leather jacket and white linen pants. He was barefoot. He had just removed his shirt. The black backdrop behind and under the couch was made of paper.

“Perfect. Now at the light.”

He looked into the soft box on his left, smiled into it. Flash.

“Perfect. Last round, with a bottle of champagne. I want something a little more mellow for this one. A fireside vibe.”

The photographer walked over the show Ryouta the shots she had taken so far.

Ryouta noticed nothing remarkable. His body and his smile were the same as last week. There was no indication of anything broken.

“Hey Linda.” He leaned in. “How about we pop open the champagne and call it a day?”

She quirked an eyebrow. “Back to work, hot stuff.”

He saw she was not entirely unaffected and felt the release of some invisible tension and then a new, delicious emotion. The slow heat of vindication.

Vindication like an Icy-Hot Patch.

 

* * *

  

**DAY 10**

It was Sunday evening. Daiki idled outside Ryouta’s house, a haven of remodeled brick and glass and haphazardly strung fairy lights, nested in overflowing yew and ivy. The low metal gate squeaked as it opened.

He wore a new shirt (black) and clean sweats. He had nothing in his pockets, but he had a basketball tucked under his arm. He looked up and saw Ryouta’s bedroom light was on though the blinds were down. He rung the doorbell.

Ms. Kise opened the door as if she had been waiting for him.

“Aw honey, Ryouta’s at a shoot.”

“Ok,” said Daiki.

 

* * *

   
**DAY 10**

Clearly an industrial elevator, the walls were still pimpled sheet-metal. Ryouta pressed 4. As the massive doors creaked shut, and the elevator began to rise, buzzing nasally, he was reminded of the Big News Story that day.

A world-famous basketball player had been caught on camera in an elevator assaulting his girlfriend. A punch to the head and she was on the ground. One could imagine the resulting tableau. The metal curtains rolling aside before the paparazzi, she curled up at his feet in her tight black dress and nice heels, a grown woman apeing a dog.

All it was missing was a fireside feeling.

Ryouta shuddered. The story was not relevant to him. Aomine had never once hit him. Not really.

These things happened, Ryouta thought (ah this was a long elevator ride), because people considered elevators temporary havens from reality. They were tiny bubbles pinched off from the tides of mundane existence. At least in all the TV shows, characters got stuck in elevators together, and, for better or worse, things happened between them.

Ryouta wished to be trapped in an elevator with Daiki, for better or worse. But likely they had already spent far too long in a ridiculous bubble.

The elevator chimed its arrival and he stepped out.

 

* * *

   
**DAY**   **9**

  
Satsuki screamed as Daiki chucked his smelly yellowed pillow at her, but to her credit, she stood her ground and caught it. She then wound up like a MLB champ and dished it right back.

“Oomph.”

“Sei-kun says--”

“Ugh fuck off.”

“ _Excuse_ me?”

He watched her bleary-eyed as she picked a path through the detritus and saw the gears in her mind turning, click, click, click, as she noted a material history of his past week: magazines layered on top of stacked dishes layered on top of crumpled sheets layered on top of socks and basketball gear layered on top of torn and stepped upon schoolwork, some half-filled with Ryouta’s round handwriting.

He was sprawled facedown on just the bare mattress. He had sweated through the sheets, even as the weather grew colder, and kicked them aside. Last night, Shintarou had left the window open and let the rain in. There was a wet patch of rubbish right under the windowsill, but the morning sun was currently making amends. The damp papers had begun to curl petal-like.

Aomine’s room was on the very top floor of a narrow row house; technically it was the attic. It was very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter and the roof sloped so he could touch it in places while he lay in bed, but at night he fell asleep to skyscraper lights all the way in Center City. When the skies were clear and the weather kind, he went out to the flat rooftop to absorb the stars.

Sadly, the weather was growing colder. The cold would find its way in.

Satsuki opened the window all the way, drew the blinds all the way up. “If you’re not in school Monday--”

“I know. Four people told me already. Shut up, Satsuki.”

Click, click, click. He saw the names flash through her mind: Mr. Akashi the principal probably by phone, Mrs. Aomine exhausted as usual and now pale with worry, Tetsuya cool and reasonable, and Shintarou, irritated. Her logic was uncanny, and comfortably predictable in its perfection. Clever, comfortable Satsuki. So easy to be with.

She was wearing a tight zip hoodie with a pleated black leather skirt. Animal print stockings were popular, so she had bunny faces on her knees. She hadn’t bothered to take off her combat boots; she knew he was gross. Her long pink hair was pulled up into a loose knot.

Mrs. Aomine was at work. Momoi took a seat at the edge of of the bed. He shifted to his side to lean on an elbow and look up at her and by god he looked terrible. He had taken off his shirt and thrown it across the room the night before; it hung on the bookshelf shrouding his basketball trophies. She noted the sprinkle of zits across his shoulders and the uneven facial hair, his thin eyebrows and the harsh serpentine angle of his narrow eyes, while Ryouta glowed glossy from a teen magazine by the closet door.

Click, click, click. Daiki closed his eyes.

“You really should just apologize.”

He couldn’t respond to that.

“Want to get tea at the new cat cafe?”

“No.”

“Come on, Dai-chan, come with me. Kittens make everyone happier.” She looped an arm through his and tried to pull him upright, but only succeeded in getting him to roll over face-down again.

She squeezed his hand. “Do you want to talk about your feelings?”

Muffled snort. “ _Fuck_ no.”

“Is your mom okay?”

Mrs. Aomine had been taking extra hours at work. The only traces of her he saw these days were the bowls of rice porridge for breakfast and the Tupperware dinner in the fridge.

“She’s fine.”

“Poor Dai-chan…”

“Whargh.”

“I’ll see you Monday, okay?”

“Yeah whatever.”

He waited several minutes after she had gone, after the front door shut, after the house began to ring with silence. Then he rolled over and let in the ghost.

This time Ryouta was wearing a tight zip hoodie and a pleated black leather skirt. He didn’t take off his combat boots, though he walked through the rubble of Daiki’s room with significantly more hesitation; he was embarrassed. Satsuki’s skirt was much too short on him. He climbed into Daiki’s bed.

As usual: “I missed you so much I thought I was going to die. I can’t live without you. Let me make it up to you, Daiki, I love you.”

As usual: A kiss. Brief and shy and so unlike the flamboyant Ryouta that was worshipped by every crowd he walked into.

As usual: Ryouta straddled Daiki’s hips and lifted his skirt.

But the sunlight kept hitting Daiki in the face and he realized he hadn’t showered in a week and he suddenly felt nauseous and he grabbed the apparition’s hands and he said--

Nothing. Even looking into a dream Ryouta’s lustful and open face, he couldn’t offer a single cheap word.

He held Ryouta’s hands until the apparition disappeared, and he got up to run the shower.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for your support. :) As always I really appreciate your comments and any constructive criticism you have to offer!


	5. Interlude

Sei in front of his bathroom mirror:

“I am abso _lute_ \-- _shit_.” His voice cracked and he scowled. The fluorescent lighting emphasized his heterochromia. One eye red and one eye gold. (He was of exotic pedigree, his father explained haughtily, to inquisitive minds.)

He was standing on a footstool at 5:00 AM Monday morning.

“I am absolute,” he said, forcing his voice to remain icy, dry, and manly. “I am absolute. Lower your head. Kneel, peasant.” He was dissatisfied by a squeakiness at the end of “peasant” so he began again. “I am absolute. I am absolute…”

He understood from a young age that he bore the twin burdens of genius and destiny and that he would face many trials from a world grown forgetful of gods and heroes. As a fifteen-year-old senior and captain of the basketball team, it seemed man and nature were determined to bar his progress to domination. To his dismay, he even had to waste some time ensuring that the hapless fools who dared to noogie or wedgie or smile at him, would never noogie nor wedgie nor smile again.

Alas, one could not craft a pistache-abricot flambé without cracking some nuts.

But there was nothing he couldn’t overcome with diligence. Even puberty would fall at his feet.

“This is not a game, Daiki.” He stared levelly at his reflection and cleared his throat. “This is not a _game_.”


End file.
